Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir

by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

Overview

A Finalist for the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography

"Deliciously bizarre and utterly American.…[A] Coen brothers movie come to life.…I couldn't put it down." —Caitlin Doughty, best-selling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?

Sounds Like Titanic tells the unforgettable story of how Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman became a fake violinist. Struggling to pay her college tuition, Hindman accepts a dream position in an award-winning ensemble that brings ready money. But the ensemble is a sham. When the group performs, the microphones are off while the music—which sounds suspiciously like the soundtrack to the movie Titanic—blares from a hidden CD player. Hindman, who toured with the ensemble and its peculiar Composer for four years, writes with unflinching candor and humor about her surreal and quietly devastating odyssey. Sounds Like Titanic is at once a singular coming-of-age memoir about the lengths to which one woman goes to make ends meet and an incisive articulation of modern anxieties about gender, class, and ambition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393357738
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	02/11/2020
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman has “performed” on PBS, QVC, and at concert halls worldwide. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, McSweeney's, Brevity, and Hippocampus. She holds a BA in Middle Eastern studies and an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and a PhD in English from the University of North Texas. She teaches creative writing at Northern Kentucky University and lives in Newport, Kentucky.

Editorial Reviews

"Hindman is an emissary for a generation, repurposing its sarcasm and irony in a nuanced, humorous, and intelligent look at what it means to construct and consume fake realities in post-9/11 America."

Angela Palm

"[An] outrageously funny, shrewdly meta memoir."

The Oprah Magazine O

"Brave and captivating."

Los Angeles Review of Books - Tucker Coombe

"Sounds Like Titanic is one of those books that’s impossible to put down because you’ll keep thinking, 'How is this real?'.…It’s an absurd, fascinating coming-of-age memoir that explores the nature of truth (or truthiness) in post-9/11 America. It’s one of my favorite books of the last five years."

Time - Elizabeth Held

"An evocative portrait of America’s literal and figurative landscapes, an incisive look at class and gender, and an examination of what authenticity means."

Justin St. Germain

"A memoir with bite."

NPR - Martha Anne Toll

"Sounds Like Titanic… is the definition of an overdeliver.… On top of [Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman’s] ability to mine unexpected resonances from a story, she writes marvelously lucid prose.… [A] rich, powerful book."

Vox - Constance Grady

"It’s difficult to write a funny, angry book. It’s even harder to write a merciless, empathetic book. But here comes Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, doing the impossible with a funny, angry, merciless, empathetic book that’s not only a hugely entertaining memoir, but an insightful meditation on a—time in our nation’s recent—history whose strange and ominous influence grows more apparent by the day."

Tom Bissell

"[A] most original memoir.… I salute Jessica Hindman for having shaped so well a remarkable piece of experience."

Vivian Gornick

"Sardonic, moving."

The New Yorker

"[A] timely, searing look at one of America’s recent dips into the pool of post-truth… and a breathtaking breakdown of the hundreds of ways society tries—and largely succeeds—in breaking the spirits of young women without giving them the vocabulary to ask for help."

Colorado Sun

"Sardonic, moving."

The New Yorker

★ 2018-11-12

A provocative memoir "about working as a fake violinist for a famous American composer."

Hindman insists that "all of the events chronicled here, to the best of my knowledge and memory, are true," but she also admits that the "I" of a memoir is "perhaps the biggest fakery of all." So she generally substitutes "you" for "I," particularly in her accounts of coming-of-age in Appalachia, where she developed a passion for the violin without ever demonstrating the gift of a prodigy. She also swallowed the lie that if you work hard enough, you can be anything you want, an assertion she learned was particularly problematic for a young female. These interludes provide context for the main narrative, which concerns the four years she spent touring to perform the music of a man identified as "The Composer," an experience that "almost killed" her. The Composer had his ensembles "play" their music with minimal amplification, while what the audience heard was the music from a hidden CD player. When someone occasionally asked if they were really playing, they could honestly say they were, but what they were playing was not what the audience was hearing. Hindman kept the job as a faux violinist because she was desperate, because her college tuition was beyond the means of her Appalachian parents, and because as an egg donor she had already exhausted her resources with "the thirty egg-children I sold to pay…undergraduate tuition." As the author connects the dots among American gullibility over fake weapons of mass destruction, chain restaurants offering faux authenticity, and her own psychological breakdown, the emotional honesty of her narrative permits no doubt. "Faking violin stardom," writes the author, "ultimately allowed me to return to what captivated me at four years old….It was simply this: I loved a song."

Like the most discerning members of the audiences for whom Hindman played, readers may be left wondering what's really real—and how it matters. A tricky, unnerving, consistently fascinating memoir.

Kirkus Reviews